Bipolar disorder is a condition that’s characterized by extreme mood swings between the lows of depression and hopelessness and the highs of euphoria and mania. Musk later clarified that he wasn’t sure if this was the exact correct diagnosis, but that he struggled with deep lows when “bad events” overtook his life.

Maybe not medically tho. Dunno. Bad feelings correlate to bad events, so maybe real problem is getting carried away in what I sign up for.

But it did not appear that Musk would be changing his ways of “getting carried away.” Musk said that this was the price he paid for buying a “ticket to hell,” suggesting that he knew the devil’s bargain of overcommitting to work.

“I feel a bit like my grandmother. She lived through the Great Depression and some real hard times. Once you’ve been through that, it stays with you for a long time. I’m not sure it ever leaves really,” Musk said in a 2015 biography of his life.

“So, I do feel joy now, but there’s still that nagging feeling that it might all go away. Even later in life when my grandmother knew there was really no possibility of her going hungry, she always had this thing about food. With Tesla, I decided to raise a huge amount of money just in case something terrible happens.”

How to deal with ‘unrelenting stress’

What may work for Musk now is untenable in the long-run for most people. Responding to Musk’s tweets, venture capitalist Fred Wilson said that “unrelenting stress” is the “life of an entrepreneur.” In Wilson’s opinion, managing that stress so it doesn’t “eat you up and mess up your relationships” meant “workouts, eating and drinking healthy, having a coach, and most of all, having a spouse who keeps it all in check.”